Employment Non-Discrimination Act bills, aiming to end discrimination against employees on the bases of sexual orientation and gender identity (transgender) have been introduced again this session in both the House (HR 1755) and Senate (S 815). ENDA bills have a long history in Congress; the first one, Wikipedia says, was introduced in 1994. Some 32 states (including Washington DC) are said to have ENDA-like laws, but at the federal level no bill has yet made it through both the House and Senate and to a President’s desk.

It seems unlikely that this Congress will break with precedent, given the House’s Republican majority. In the meantime, some ENDA proponents have taken aim at the religious exemption that is in the House and Senate bills. The exemption (sec. 6) provides that an organization that is free to take account of religion when hiring, because it fits the religious exemption in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, is exempt from ENDA’s new nondiscrimination requirements. This exemption was put into the bill by ENDA’s sponsors in 2007 when the House took up and eventually passed that year’s ENDA bill (the Senate did not act). (Earlier exemption language in the ENDA bills that year was wholly inadequate and was strongly protested by religious organizations.)

The ACLU, the New York Times, and others are demanding that the religious exemption be narrowed, weakened. Instead, it ought to be strengthened if Congress insists on passing the legislation–strengthened so that, for example, a religious organization is assured it will not suffer retaliation from government (losing a license or grant or tax exemption, etc.) if it utilizes the exemption to uphold the organization’s religiously based conduct code in which sexual activity is reserved for the man-woman marital relationship.